The Serbian National Sculptor: Being Some Account of Ivan Mestrovic and His Art

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THE SERBIAN NATIONAL SCULPTOR

59

delicately modelled before it hardened. It
was then gilded with gold-leaf and its back-
ground was solidly painted in blue, relieved
by accents of violet, green and red in the
cartouches, wreaths and masks. Finally
the entire wall surface was glazed with
transparent color and scumbled with semi-
opaque pigment in order to suggest a little

of the patina of the Renaissance chapel
walls. The four figures enthroned upon
the walls represent Architecture, Sculpture
and Painting, and Printing, "the art
preservative of the arts." The broad cove
of the dome bears a conventionalized
vine-covered trellis, pierced by four octa-
gonal openings which give glimpses of sky.

THE SERBIAN NATIONAL SCULPTOR

Being Some Account of Ivan Mestrovic and His Art
BY W. G. BLAIKIE-MURDOCK >-,- ~*

IT was not until quite lately that people
throughout America and Europe began
to take much interest in Serbia. Hidden
away behind frontiers of wild and towering
mountains, her denizens speaking a lan-
guage singularly difficult for all others to
learn, the little country attracted only
very occasional travelers; and hence she
continued, generation after generation, to
preserve many of her ancient customs
with that tenacity and fondness for
which Wales is famous in this relation.
In the year 1912, however, when war
broke out between the Turks and the
Serbians, the gaze of the world was at length
directed towards the latter race; and
when it transpired, a little later, that
Serbia was destined to play an eminently
romantic part in a much greater military
drama, interest in the land quickly com-
menced growing wider and deeper. Then,
when she underwent terrible sufferings
owing to her gallantry, this feeling of
interest in her doings ripened into heart-
felt sympathy; and, largely as a result of
the development of these sentiments, an
unprecedented affair is occurring in London.
For, at the South Kensington Museum

there — which hitherto, apart from its
print-room, has confined its exhibits almost
exclusively to the productions of deceased
masters — two spacious halls have been
constituted a temporary domicile for
sculpture by a Serbian of today, Ivan
Mestrovic, the collection embodying up-
wards of seventy pieces, several of them of
huge dimensions. English people have
flocked to see the show, many of them
being attracted thither, no doubt, simply
by the glamour attaching at present to
whatsoever things are Serbian. But Mes-
trovic requires no extraneous recommen-
dation of that sort, a literally overwhelm-
ing greatness pertaining to much of his
work; and indeed this unexpected display-
ing thereof — if not the most important
event which has taken place, in the whole
art world of London, since the Whistler
Memorial Exhibition — is unquestionably
the most momentous of such events so far
as sculpture is concerned. "C'etait mon
reve!" said Auguste Rodin enthusiastically,
on seeing the Serbian artist's creations. *

Ivan Mestrovic was born in 1883 at
the village of Otavice, in the Dalmatian
Highlands, a district which geographers

♦When Mestrovic's sculpture was first exhibited in London there was great divergence of opinion con-
cerning not merely its merit but character. Some contended that the works were not only inartistic but morally
offensive. Among these was Prof. Selwyn Image, who addressed an open letter of protest to the Editor of the
London Times. To this letter John Lavery, Charles Ricketts and John S. Sargent jointly made reply as follows:
To the Editor of the Times: „„ „ , . ** t ™ . • tt j

Sir- Prof. Selwyn Image in his letter of June 30 allows skill and genius to M. Ivan Mestrovic. He considers,
however that not a little of his work is wilful, inchoate, amorphous, in one case morally offensive, and fears that
this exhibition will make for the encouragement of certain morbid and pernicious tendencies of our day.

Over and above the skill and genius even admitted by Prof. Selwyn Image there remains in the work of Ivan
Mestrovic the tragic intensity, the austerity and passion which the artist has imparted to his statues and groups.
These high qualities place them apart from all merely morbid and pernicious tendencies, and, in the tragic world
to which these works belong, there is no room for what is trivial and morally offensive.

Yours obediently,

John Lavery,
C. Ricketts,
John S. Sargent.

MODEL FOR TEMPLE COMMEMORATING KOSOVO

IVAN MESTROVIO

regard as part of Austria, but whose
natives, far from being Teutonic, are what
ethnologists style Serbo-Croats, being as
closely related to the actual Serbians as
the Scots are to the English. Coming of
a peasant family, Ivan spent his early
boyhood in tending his father's flocks;
yet very soon he essayed sculpture in
wood or stone, and some of these first
efforts of his may still be seen at the
museum of Knin. Accordingly, at the
age of eighteen, he was apprenticed to a
marble- worker; while in 1900, getting
some financial aid from the local govern-
ment of his homeland, he was enabled to
proceed to Vienna, and become a pupil at
its art-school. Two years afterwards he
exhibited some work at the Viennese
Secession, while in 1907, having meanwhile
gone to Paris, he displayed several items
at the Salon d'Automne, an institution
nowadays the chief rallying-ground of
those younger French artists who are truly
aspirational ; and, having been warmly

acclaimed by a number of these, he
presently held a collective show of his
productions at Vienna. That was in 1910,
but it was not until the following year,
when a representative assemblage of the
sculptor's works figured in the Serbian
Pavilion, at the vast International Expo-
sition at Rome, that the full splendor of
his gifts began to evoke its one homage;
and surely none, who studied his output
there for the first time, will ever be able
to forget the impressions received. Since
then two good tributes to him have ap-
peared, the one in the Italian paper,
L'Eroicciy the other in the more familiar
German periodical, Die Kunst fur Alle.
And these articles probably had much to
do with stirring up enthusiasm about
Mestrovic among a group of young English
artists, who realizing that the present state
of European politics gave them an unique
opportunity of doing something for their
new idol, marshalled a committee including
the Serbian Ambassador, together with

THE SERBIAN NATIONAL SCULPTOR

61

numerous prominent English politicians,
with whose aid they contrived to find the
money requisite to bring some of the
sculptor's works overseas. Nor is the
ardor of these moving spirits bated yet,
it being their hope and intention that,
at no very distant date, the Serbian master
will be'represented for a while in America.

freedom from foreign suzerainty. George
Borrow in Wild Wales and Matthew Arnold
in The Study of Celtic Literature, have
pointed out how intimate are the Welsh
peasantry, even, with the rich legendary
lore of their land, how familiar they are
still with the deeds of the various bygone
champions of the Cymry. And it is prc-

HERO'S HEAD

IVAN MESTROVIC

As already noted, Mestrovic in no way
requires the extraneous recommendation
of belonging to a race in which the world
chances to be specially interested at present;
yet the knowledge that he is Serbian forms
something of an aid, as will be seen
presently, to a just understanding of his
art. Serbia was compared above to Wales,
and that comparison may well be em-
phasized now; for not only are these two
countries at one in having shown an out-
standing fidelity to their ancient usages,
hut both cherish with pride a history con-
sisting in a long and strenuous fight for

cisely thus also with the Serbians, the very
peasants among them loving to talk of the
great martial actions of their forefathers in
the middle-ages, and speaking of these
actions as though they had occurred but
yesterday. Indeed, the present national
head-dress of the race, a red cap with a
black band, is a survival from very remote
times, having been first worn as a symbol
of mourning for the battle of Kosovo in
1389, when the mediaeval Serb empire
succumbed to Turkish onslaughts, the last
Serbian Tsar dying with his face to the foe.
And as to that Marko Kraljevic who,

THE ANNUNCIATION

IVAN MESTKOVIC

after this fray, contrived to rally his
countrymen against their oppressors; even
in the present war Serbian soldiers have
declared that he had appeared to them,
mounted on his famous grey charger, the
apparition charging them to "remember
hardihood in the day of battle," as an old
Celtic poet sings. Marko, in short, is
the Owen Glendower of Serbia, countless
ballads and tales keeping his sacred memory

fresh; and nowhere is this traditional liter-
ature better known, and better loved, than
in that Dalmatian district which gave birth
to Mestrovic, patriotism having naturally
been kept particularly warm, among the
Serbo-Croats, by the mere fact that the
rule over them is alien. They feel, and
feel strongly, that all the Southern Sclavs
should be banded together; they maintain
that a Serbian Empire should once more

THE SERBIAN NATIONAL SCULPTOR

63

be an actuality. And this eager desire
for racial unity, this passionate cherishing
of an heroic past, are what have ever formed
the main inspiration of the young Serbian
sculptor's art. His earliest essays in
sculpture might be described as illustra-
tions to those patriotic songs which he
had heard sung on the hills round his home,
and, since then, he has continued to draw
his subject-matter chiefly from his country's
story, among his latest works being a model
for a temple commemorating Kosovo,
which he, and many of his compatriots,
would fain see erected on the very site
of the battle.

Lafcadio Hearn once observed that,
would England maintain in the future, her
lofty tradition in art she must needs
imbibe a strain of Sclavonic blood. And,
in saying this, he does not appear to have
meant that the Sclavs are certain to be the
supreme artistic race of the future, but
that English people, having lived in
comfortable conditions throughout many
generations, have slowly grown somewhat
inclined to be unemotional, whereas the
Sclavs, less fortunate, are still capable of
tense feelings, of primitive and almost
savage passions. Whether this suggested
infusion would really benefit the Anglo-
Saxon school is a difficult question, one
which need not be debated here; and
Hearn 's words are cited, rather, because
Mestrovic's art reflects in abundance the
elements aforesaid, while in other respects
too, it is essentially Sclavonic. Living in
wild and frequently desolate country, the
Sclavs have made an art among whose
predominant notes is necessarily pathos, as
witness the novels of Turgenieff, the music
of Tchaikowsky. And though Mestrovic, in
forming his technique, has probably learned
much from the masterpieces of ancient
Greece and Egypt, the actual temper of his
work, instead of having anything in com-
mon with theirs, is kin to that in the
characteristic things by his racial fellows.
The caryatids in Greek and Egyptian
buildings are usually of a curiously calm
nature— impassive figures, having the sem-
blance of neither asking for, nor offering,
any sort of sympathy — but those of
Metrovic's creation are intensely human,
the mien of each charged with a deep and
appealing air of sadness. In his inde-

pendent statues, moreover, now he will
show a woman mourning for her husband
who has been killed by the Turks, now a
man lamenting his wife slaughtered during
his absence at the wars; and, nearly invari-
ably, there is a poignancy as terrible as
ever artist compassed. In one way, how-
ever, the sadness expressed by the Serbian
sculptor is dissimilar from that which lives in
the pages of Turgenieff, and throbs through
much of Tchaikowsky's music. For while
the Russian peasant, as depicted by the
novelist and suggested by the composer,
commonly presents the guise of being
resigned to suffering as his inevitable lot,
Mestrovic's figures have the air of seething
with fury and the desire for retribution.
"Forward, Serbia! and avenge the past!"
they appear to shout savagely; while
search as one will throughout these dyna-
mic productions, scarcely anywhere can one
detect a passage which seems to have
given the artist difficulty, everywhere the
stone or plaster has the look of having
obeyed his will implicitly, and, in no in-
stance, is the impression received that the
inspiring emotion has suffered any cooling
during its crystallization in a work of art.
Mestrovic's art reveals but little of that
grace naturally looked for in fine sculpture;
it discloses but few separate lines to linger
over fondly, on account of their rhythm,
as one lingers over many in the statuary
of Praxiteles and his school, men who
attained so signally the " unheard melodies"
which Keats declares surpass those which
are heard. Only, if herein lies a grave
limitation on the part of the Serbian, may
he not well be ranked far beyond many
men possessing these orthodox merits?
For artists, it should always be remembered,
are great in proportion as they express
real depths of feeling, notably such feelings
as are of a subtle and mysterious order;
they are great in proportion as they see
into life. And Mestrovic, figuring the
famous legends of his country, has done
far more than that, expressing the pas-
sionate soul of that country, giving form
to its paramount aspirations; while there
clings to nearly all his pieces, that savour
of the mysterious and ineffable which ever,
and necessarily, pertains to strong emotions
themselves. His creations are perhaps less
beautiful, in the commonly accepted sense

<)4

ART AND PROGRESS

of the term, than those of numerous recent
and contemporary sculptors; but, fully as
virile as any of these — not even excepting
Rodin — he is more spiritual than they, he
reflects a profounder inwardness. And it
is_this element in him — rather, possibly,

than anything else — which makes him
worthy to be hailed as a towering artist,
one of the very few modern workers in
sculpture who may be mentioned, reason-
ably, along with the early masters thereof
whom all revere.

MUSIC IN THE STUDIO

FRANCIS C. JONES